MST3K (612)

612 - The Starfighters - I am impressed. This is a completely worthless movie. To quote Mike: "I really think there's more nothing in this movie than any movie we've seen." The main antagonist of the picture is a freakin' storm that we never even see. A full 85% of the movie is shot of jets flying, refueling and landing. And still, the guys salvage it. They went in there and riffed the hell out of this thing until it was funny. "I've got a lump in my poopie suit."

I am surprised. Up until now, I would've argued that with really boring bad movies, there's nothing that Mike/Joel and the bots can do to make them palatable. I used to think that the bad movie needed to have at least a little of the "so bad it's good" in it to make for a fun episode. I was wrong. Maybe it was just the military setting that opened the way for good riff opportunities, but we got scads of funny lines in this episode. "We have a visual ID on 'numbnuts.'"

The host segments were also very good. "Cowboy Mike's Ricochet Barbecue Sauce" was an incredibly funny commercial parody. "Bold?? Well, hell yes it's bold!!" My favorite Mike line in recent memory, shortly after the bots yank his underwear off in another host segment: "How'd you get those off past my jumpsuit?" Kevin Murphy demonstrates that he's just as musically talented as Mike during his "United Servo Academy Men's Chorus Hymn" segment. Kevin both wrote the clever lyrics, which mash lines from popular songs into a choral style, and sang all ten of the Servo parts. Very nice.

I'm just a tad weirded-out by the sexual tint in some of the host segments. In addition to the above-mentioned segment where the bots remove Mike's unmentionables, there were two other host segment bits that made me twist uncomfortably in my seat. After twenty minutes of riffing sexual innuendo over the endless "in-flight refueling scene" in the movie, what do the bots do? They refuel each other. To be terribly, horribly graphic, Crow sticks his nose into Servo's butt. Ahem. Were they not thinking this segment through? Or was it was supposed to be sexually weird just as it appears? Or, what? Perhaps worse was the scene in the final host segment, in which Frank and Dr. F are connected to a mutual mind reading device. Dr. F commands Frank to dwell on a certain thought: "Think it hard. Yes. Good. Yes. Frank! Yes! Yes!" *Cough*. Was this all a result of the frustration the writers must have felt trying to write for this nothing of a movie? Yikes!

"It's the new Air Force Goofy Bomb, from Whamo!" (8/10)

film d. Will Zens (1964)
mst d. Jim Mallon (29 Oct 1994)